CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

Manovich brings up an interesting concept of how we construct narrative through the navigable space through which we travel. This space is marked, narratively, by the "stable points in space" (p. 264), or as I would say, "places," we stop at along the way. In other words, moving through space is a narrative defined by the stable places we pause to consider as we navigate through the vast ether of space, or non-place. For Manovich to admit this conceptual allowance is a bit of a puzzle for me, given his treatment of narrative in the sections on database and especially on narrative vis-a-vis the Web. Could we not say that a user who navigates through cyberspace is defining a narrative by the meaningful "places" -- sites that matter to her -- she chooses to visit along the way? Would Manovich allow such a narrative to be constructed out of his [skewed] vision of the equally flat Web? I should think so, especially if he claims that "the key feature of computer space is its navigability," (p. 259), and navigation experiences on the Web can be shown in any number of ways, from as simple an action as the "Back" button to as complex a script as the BreadCrumbs Firefox add-on. The "data flaneur" constructs his subjective space in the virtual community of the distinctly non-virtual-reality Web. VRML be damned, Lev; we can all make our trajectories through virtual spaces without qualifying those spaces as only virtual if they are 3-D.

These trajectories are similarly made in physical, urban spaces. Castells speaks of advents in the socio-telecommunications fabric that led to a wide simultaneous decentralization and redistribution of urban spaces and communications, but what struck me was how this "space of flows" (p. 408) impacts the workspace and lifespace of the average telecommuter. Though we don't all meet up at the same building at the same time, our "flexible time" allows--nay--impels us to meet up virtually in the non-places of airports and waiting rooms, whether the latter be at D.E. Shaw and Company or in my Winston office in the fifteen minutes I have between classes on Monday. Personally, my time is own flexible insofar as I choose when to acknowledge how much I actually have to do, and my "flexible location pattern" is a recognition of all the stable points in space I occupy that guilt me into thinking about how I could better be using my flexible time. In short, Castells makes me consider the effects of the slow disappearance of boundaries between workspace and homespace as we in the information society fly forward to our literal "offices-on-the-run" (p. 426).

Kellerman's non-places seem to be the "betweens" of life: airports, bus terminals, train stations, etc. But to Baudelaire's-via-Manovich's flaneur, aren't these non-place betweens really the epitome of socially constructed space? The flaneur is at home in the crowd of individuals shuffling from one stable point in space to the next; if they didn't feel uncomfortable in transition, he wouldn't have a reason to get up in the morning. He lives for the impermanence of crowds. Extending this a bit by reaching back to previous class discussions, couldn't the data flaneur feel most at home when physically isolated from others (i.e., at the small-scale place of a desktop at home) but virtually imbedded in the passing trajectories of Web users as they microblog their front stages between stable points in cyberspace (or "cyberplace" (Kellerman p. 131))? Does the data flaneur depend on the status update to feel at home in the shiftless seas of milieux of innovation? In what ways is facebook a non-place? Kellerman might not be so agreeable on this point, as he claims that "virtual places further lack a cultural depth, since they have no history and may not have an impact on a collective memory" (p. 132). I'm not sure Kellerman is much of a gamer, nor a Web denizen either, but what about dedicated and long-running MOOs and MUDs? specific guilds in specific realms in World of Warcraft? the social communities formed by active listserv contributors? I acknowledge that I may be straw-manning Kellerman here a bit, but I do so because I've seen this kind of anti-virtual place-based rhetoric before in the caustic treatment of virtual communities (which act as "places" in and of themselves) by the likes of Neil Postman, Michael Bugeja, Albert Borgmann, who have in turn been diametrically and virulently opposed by advocates such as Howard Rheingold, Beverly Hunter, and Jay David Bolter. To that list I suppose we could add Meyrowitz.

But the "looking glass self," as Meyrowitz invokes Cooley (p. depends on font size), is actively constructed through the virtual communities and "stable points of space" that we inhabit through our online daily lives. Those daily lives--our virtual selves--are more increasingly being shaped by others as well as by us, reflecting on last week's discussion. We might say, drawing on Kellerman, that our virtual selves and virtual places are developed these days by the 'copresence' (Shields, 1996 as qtd. in Kellerman p. 132) of our virtual co-inhabitants. This copresence extends my (and our) previous discussions of boundedness: in many ways, our inabilities to separate homeplace from workspace is a direct consequence of being connected to a multiplicity of social networks at any given time (right now, for example, I'm available to contact by at least 6 different methods: IM, e-mail, facebook, Twitter, SMS, cell phone). Meyrowitz would certainly agree with Peter Morville's Ambient Findability thesis I posted to the wiki last week: in seeking to be in a constant state of connectedness, our looking-glass selves can't disappear from the inquiries of the "generalized others" (p. depends on font size) because of our seamless integration into plural glocalities.

Alternate titles for this blog post:

• "Why Lev Manovich named his 4 children Victor, Rachel, Marcus, and Leif"


• "I'm a data dandy and other place-based confessions"


• "Take that, freshman-year roommate: I told you Jefferson, IA actually functioned as a magnet for the hinterlands of rural Greene County!"


• "The Unbearable Likeness of Being...a digital flaneur in too many places at the same time"